


spider taketh hold

by badacts



Series: a posteriori [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Bucky Barnes-centric, M/M, Multi, Post Avengers: Infinity War Part 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 13:09:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15582687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: There’s a rat in Avengers support who doesn’t know her real name. Sam Wilson didn’t sign up for this, or for exactly how bad Bucky Barnes is at retiring.





	spider taketh hold

**Author's Note:**

> "The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces." - Proverbs 30:28
> 
> So, I was thinking about how I would want a Black Widow movie to go, and now we’re here. 
> 
> This takes place in a post-Avengers 4 world, after my upcoming fic 'deus ex machina', which is why I'm not going to say too much, but you'll get the gist as you go along.

Karen McGuinn, senior analyst for Avengers support, expected something a little more elegant than a glorified bunker as her work space when she signed on. At least the work is interesting.

At the moment she’s decoding and translating intel from a small Russian criminal sect that may or may not be a global risk. Vague, but the deeper she gets, the more she’s convinced that it may actually be a legitimate threat. There are enhanced humans involved, though the details are as sketchy as the locational data. 

Mostly she’s got mission statements tangled up with mythological turns of phrase, and she’s teasing it out because she’s good at what she does. Windowless office and too-young-to-be-a-senior-analyst workmate aside, this is why she’s here. 

Technically, Yelena is partly here because she is fluent in Russian, but there’s an excellent translation software package. There’s no reason why someone still in their twenties should have ‘senior’ in front of their job position unless they’re field operatives, and that’s because most of them don’t live much past thirty-five anyway.

Also, that Karen doesn’t read much Cyrillic is actually useful here, because it means she can focus on deconstructing the code like it’s pictographic. The matrix on her second screen is already most of the way to the final web-structure, and she connects the last of it with a wave. The words rearrange on the screen, decoded. That’s when she recognises the very last phrase on the page.

“ красная комната растет,” she reads, squinting a little. “Is that…?”

“It means ‘Red Room rising’,” Yelena replies from behind her.

Karen straightens up. The Red Room isn’t exactly a much-discussed organisation outside of industry whispers, but that doesn’t mean she knows nothing about it. She clicks her nails against the keyboard, waiting for the translating to finish.

After a moment, the translated document opens on her screen. She scans it, feeling her heart rate increase a touch. This - this is important. 

She opens her mouth. Before she gets a chance to say another word, a wire drops over her head and pulls tight against her throat.

 

* * *

 

Bucky never set foot in the Avengers compound before, but in the wake of everything he arrived and then never left. At first, it was to pick up the pieces left behind. Then, it was in case he was needed. Now, it’s mostly because he’s honestly not sure where else he would go. That, and he  _ likes _ living here.

There’s nothing that makes him reevaluate that faster than a full-scale alert in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

He’s retired. He’s not dead, though, and he was never going to sit by and let other people protect his home, so he joins the rush of people heading for their stations. There aren’t many familiar faces, but that’s not surprising - he took a room on the lower levels rather than up with the Avengers because he wanted that separation. Also, it’s never hard to find them.

No one stops him when he enters the Avengers conference room. It’s a bustle of activity inside, Hawkeye strapping on her quiver and Spiderman slumped over the couch like he isn’t ready for anything and Captain Marvel speaking rapid-fire into her cellphone while looking at another cellphone. 

Moving straight through the centre of it all is Hill, headset on and expression steely. 

“Barnes,” she snaps when she catches sight of him, and he’s expecting her to say  _ go back to your suite and stay out of the way _ , so he pauses for a split second when she actually continues with, “With me.”

She leads him straight back out of the conference room, handing him a tablet without slowing. On the screen, a slight figure is cutting a swathe through a hallway brimming with security staff. He blinks, but the image doesn’t quite resolve itself. He’s still seeing a different woman who moved the same way.

“Exactly,” Hill says, without looking at him. “How’s your Russian?”

“Had seventy years of practice,” he replies. It wasn’t seventy whole years, sure, but he’ll count his experience as ‘immersion’.

“I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that even though you are technically only a consultant now, I want you to do whatever is necessary to detain her,” Hill replies, pausing outside the stairwell door. She takes the tablet back and puts an earpiece in his hand. “Most of the Avengers are going out on a separate call, but you’ll have backup. Keep that earpiece in.”

Bucky shoves it into his ear. Instantly he can hear the back-and-forth of the compound COs and the odd interjections of Carol. “Floor?”

“Tenth,” Hill says, both over the earpiece and in real time. 

Bucky offers her a messy salute and pushes into the stairwell, taking them at a jog. The tenth is the top floor in this building, which is both where some of the Avengers have their offices and where some of the storage is. Apparently Stark designed the building topsy-turvy, probably for exactly this situation. The agent on the move has limited exits.

“Agents on the tenth floor, fall back,” Hill commands over the earpiece. “Winter Soldier is moving in.”

The next time someone asks why Bucky retired, he’s going to tell them it’s because they still call him by the same stupid codename, Christ.

“Winter Soldier, be advised the target seems to be experiencing some symptoms of confusion,” someone says, somewhat breathlessly. “She was making for the window like she was going to throw herself out but stopped and turned back.”

“Did she lose her nerve?” Hill asks, though even as she says it she sounds doubtful.

“It was more like-” whoever was speaking is cut off with a grunt.

“Fall back,” Hill repeats sharply.

Bucky draws his sidearm as he slips through the fire door onto the tenth floor. He can’t see the fight but he can hear it - he has the plan for each floor memorised, and he takes a circular route towards where he thinks the agent is. 

He’s in luck - he sees her before he sees anyone else, silhouetted against the wall of glass on the south side of the building. The unlucky part is that he’s in the light himself, and when she catches sight of him in her peripheral vision she fires on him without pausing.

The bullet pings off of his left hand, and just like that he has the girl’s full attention. Well, he should say woman - she’s young, but not that young. Bucky doesn’t recognise her, but that doesn’t mean much. 

“ _ Soldat _ ,” she says, so the lack of recognition clearly isn’t mutual. This time when she fires on him, she aims for his head.

She’s a good shot, but she can’t shoot through metal. Bucky advances even as she’s firing, and she realises at the last moment that it’s not going to stop him. By then, it’s too late. Bucky hits her dead on, driving her into the wall.

Her head collides, hard. For a moment Bucky thinks she’s been knocked unconscious, her weight slumping into his hold. Her eyes flutter open after a moment, and she looks dazedly up at him. The recognition is gone. 

Then she shakes her head, it’s back, and she tucks up her legs to her chest and kicks him so hard in the chest he feels his ribs groan. He takes a few staggered steps backwards, and this time it’s her hitting him with another kick to the chest.

Now they’re hand to hand, it’s even more obvious who trained this woman - she’s as light-footed as a dancer, uses her strength intelligently, and her technique is impeccable. Bucky has fought women like her before, in battle and in training, and one in particular he remembers more than most.

“Widow,” he says, an acknowledgement and a greeting in one, and gets bared teeth like a smile in response.

She produces a knife - Bucky strikes it from her hand and gets a line scored across the leather of his jacket by another that she’s somehow swapped the handgun for. He breaks her left wrist taking that one, but she doesn’t seem to register it.

He remembers that. The way a mission could take over to the point of excluding everything else, right up to any injuries that wouldn’t physically stop him from completing his objective. Of course, those missions were implanted directly into his mind - and he has to wonder - 

The woman punches him in the face. He responds with the same, and he’s better at it. She staggers backwards towards the window, shaking her head again.

Something about it makes him pause. That’s when she looks up at him, and says in a very conventional American accent, “What?”

Then she really sees him, recognises him again, and her face crumples. That’s familiar, too - fear.

She takes a gasping breath, and for a moment he thinks she’ll drop the handgun she had redrawn. Instead she says, voice shaking, “I’m not in control,” and raises it to her own head. Her eyes clench shut.

This is really not Bucky’s area of expertise. He says, “That’s a bad idea.”

“I’ll hurt you,” she replies. “I already hurt…” She sobs a little.

“You can’t hurt me,” Bucky scoffs a bit, though his bruised ribs might contest that statement. They’ll be healed by tomorrow though, so it barely counts.

“I hit you!” she says. “You’re the Winter Soldier!”

“She may be acting,” Hill cautions him over his earpiece, which is fair.

“Lots of people have hit me,” Bucky says. “I won’t take it personal. Not if you didn’t mean to do it.”

It’s like he’s thrown her a life saver. She gasps, and the gun drops a few inches, though she doesn’t open her eyes. “I didn’t mean it, I couldn’t stop, she said it and I just lost myself and I  _ couldn’t stop _ .”

Fuck. Bucky takes that more like a bullet than a turn of a phrase, because there’s ‘familiar’ and then there’s ‘triggering’, and that is getting close to the line. He says, voice hoarse, “You’ve stopped now.”

“You - you need to stop me,” she stumbles, sniffling. “Please.”

“Do me a favour and put the gun down, alright, sweet?” Bucky asks. “It’ll be okay as long as you put your weapons down.” It’s not true, but as she is now she might believe it anyway.

“ _ Please _ ,” she begs. Bucky’s pretty cold, an obvious product of his entire life, but even he’s not capable of writing this off as an act. Not when he’s been the one breaking free, shaking and remembering what he’s done.

“I won’t let you hurt anyone else,” he tells her, and that’s not a lie. “I’ll make you safe. There’s no one else from the Red Room here, okay?”

He knows as soon as he says it that it’s the wrong thing. The woman’s eyes snap open, and they’re clear again.

“Captain America is in action,” Hill says. “Far quadrant, closing fast on your position.”

“Too slow,” Bucky replies, which turns out to be prescient. 

He nearly avoids a bullet wound. As it is, one furrows through the skin of his flesh arm as he darts behind the cover of the wall. He’s moving again before he even consciously registers the sound of running footsteps.

He’s just in time to see the woman fire two shots into the window, spiderwebbing the glass with a deafening crack before she barrels full-body into the pane and shatters it. The glass sprays outwards and falls. So does she.

“Sam!” rips out of Bucky’s throat. He skids to a halt before he follows the woman down, looking over the edge.

Her hair ripples bright gold in the air as she falls. Bucky’s brain tells him it should be red, even though the face is all wrong. He’s just resigned himself to watching the her die on the concrete ten storeys down while he does nothing when there’s a flash of red-blue-silver and the woman stops falling and starts flying.

“Missed your voice,” Captain America says over the earpiece, arcing up on outstretched wings until he’s up on Bucky’s level, the woman dangling from his grasp. “You drop something?”

He makes to sling the woman back through the gaping window. However, that’s when she comes back to life, fighting against Sam’s grasp around her waist with sudden fury. A strong leg draws up and kicks Sam hard in the left wing. 

With a sharp, “Shit!” he drops ten feet, then fifteen, narrowly avoiding an out-of-control pinwheel. This does nothing to dissuade his unwilling passenger, who claws at his face with both hands.

Bucky hasn’t been too fond of heights since the 1940s. He has precisely half a second to think that before he takes three quick steps back, and then takes a running leap out of the window too.

It’s more good luck than good management that he collides with the pair of them dead on. Sam snarls a curse, jerking under the sudden addition of an extra two hundred pounds. Fortuitously, he grabs for Bucky with one arm and holds.

Bucky, meanwhile, reaches out with his flesh arm and deftly taps the wildcat on the jaw. Her eyes roll back in her head and she turns to instant dead weight.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sam is saying, and Bucky grabs the kid with one arm and Sam with the other and swallows his stomach as they start to fall.

It’s a controlled descent. Mostly. Sam angles his wings and they tilt out towards the grassy training grounds, turning a steep almost-corkscrew to slow them down.

“Where’s Carol?!” Bucky shouts over the wind ripping at him. How the fuck Sam actually enjoys doing this as his dayjob is a mystery to him.

“Out!” Sam replies. “You think I’d be here carrying your fat ass if she was here?!”

“I wish she was!” Bucky says, looking down at the rapidly-approaching ground. They’re three storeys up - two storeys -

“Now!” Sam yells, and Bucky lets go of him, curls up, and falls.

Landing hurts. His body is hardier than most, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Especially when he curls the unconscious woman into him and cushions her fall rather than protecting himself. His breath leaves his lungs in one punched-out rush, and then returns more painfully a choking instant later.

He sees Sam make a less-than-graceful landing at his side through blurry eyes, and then there are hands carefully checking his head and neck. Bucky groans and slaps them away. 

“‘M fine,” he protests, pushing himself up to sitting. “Her?”

“In one piece,” Sam replies distractedly. He sounds a little winded himself. “You are fucking-”

“Cap, Barnes, is the agent secured?” Hill’s voice is crisp, clear and calm over Bucky’s earpiece, a sharp comparison. 

“She’s secured,” Sam responds, pulling a ziptie from his belt, at the same time as Bucky says, “She’s a Black Widow.”

Sam blinks. “Black Widow is-”

“I suspected so,” Hill interrupts. “There’s a team coming down to detain her. ETA two minutes.”

“Neat,” Bucky grunts, standing. He’s covered in dirt and grass. “Check her carefully. She had like twelve knives.”

“Seriously,” Sam says, even as he does just that.  _ Now _ he sounds pissed.

“ _ A _ Black Widow,” Bucky reiterates. “There was never just the one.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on [tumblr](http://badacts.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
